Entangled Landscapes: Early Modern China and Europe

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Edited by Yue Zhuang and Andrea M. Riemenschnitter

The exchange of landscape practice between China and Europe from 1500–1800 is an important chapter in art history. While the material forms of the outcome of this exchange, like jardin anglo-chinois and Européenerie are well documented, this book moves further to examine the role of the exchange in identity formation in early modern China and Europe.

Proposing the new paradigm of “entangled landscapes”, drawing from the concept of “entangled histories”, this book looks at landscape design, cartography, literature, philosophy and material culture of the period. Challenging simplistic, binary treatments of the movements of “influences” between China and Europe, Entangled Landscapes reveals how landscape exchanges entailed complex processes of appropriation, crossover and transformation, through which Chinese and European identities were formed.

Exploring these complex processes via three themes—empire building, mediators’ constraints, and aesthetic negotiations, this work breaks new ground in landscape and East-West studies. Interdisciplinary and revisionist in its thrust, it will also benefit scholars of history, human geography and postcolonial studies.

“The book launches us into grasping emergent, hybrid expressions of value and power, nature and society, through the entangled circulation of images.” - Prasenjit Duara, Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies, Duke University

“This book...provides a crucial theoretical clearing for interdisciplinary and cross-cultural investigation of landscape traditions in their political, moral, and aesthetic traditions. In many ways, this book is exactly what landscape studies has been wanting for a long time. The wait is over.” - W.J.T. Mitchell, editor of Landscape and Power

Yue Zhuang is senior lecturer in Chinese at the University of Exeter.

Andrea Riemenschnitter is chair professor of Modern Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Zurich.